STORAGE

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Today, Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) enhanced its Complete Storage Solutions, adding new high-end Sun StorEdge 9970 and 9980 systems to its arsenal along with a new Sun StorEdge L5500 tape library. These new products, combined with the Sun StorEdge Performance and Utilization Software Suites and high-end server systems technology reportedly deliver the most complete end-to-end data center consolidation solution for lowering TCO. "At Sun, we listen to our customers and we are delivering best-in-class, open and complete storage solutions," said Mark Canepa, executive vice president, Network Storage, Sun Microsystems. "Sun is uniquely positioned to do this. Our customers don't just need storage consolidation, they need server, storage and data consolidation to achieve the TCO for success in today's economic climate." Additionally, Sun is announcing that it is working closely with Hitachi Data Systems to ensure the two companies' storage software offerings, Sun Storage ONE and Hitachi True North, are closely linked through open standards for enhanced storage management. A long-time industry need, standards and interoperability will ease the administration challenges for customers and provide higher levels of protection, optimization and management for storage environments. "This new box enables Sun customers to continue the process of data center consolidation. Now Sun has the ability to offer full infrastructure consolidation, for servers and storage. As the number of devices decreases, the individual performance, availability, and capacity considerations become paramount. This box is perfect for that," said Steve Duplessie, Senior Analyst with Enterprise Storage Group. With these new additions, Sun has created the industry's most seamless server, storage, software and services combination for complete storage data center consolidation -- helping customers optimize assets, dramatically improve the efficiency of operations, and reduce the complexity of their storage environments so that they can deliver the service levels that their end users require. By adding Sun's leading high-end servers, the Sun Fire(TM) 12K and Sun Fire 15K, to the mix, the company is uniquely positioned to provide the most comprehensive end-to-end data center consolidation solution on the market today. "It is very encouraging to see a company like Sun challenge closed and proprietary offerings head-on," said Ronald Williams, Enterprise Production Services Manager, Earthlink, Inc. "When we decided to work with Sun, the company's end-to-end offerings were certainly impressive and helped decrease our total cost of ownership -- and now it looks like they just got even better. As we grow our offering to support more and more customers, Sun will be at the top of our list for IT partners and solutions." SUN STOREDGE 9970 AND 9980 SYSTEMS The high-performance, extremely scalable, and highly available Sun StorEdge 9970 and 9980 systems are supersets of Hitachi Data Systems' Lightning 9970V and Lightning 9980V products that customers can only purchase from Sun. The Sun StorEdge systems are optimized for the Solaris(TM) Operating Environment, certified for Sun Cluster 3.0 and part of Sun's ongoing certification and performance program. Combining the power of the Solaris operating environment with the industry's first 2 Gigabit per second FC connectivity, a blade architecture and virtualization capabilities, Sun StorEdge 9900 series customers are better able to maximize their system investments. Additionally, the Sun StorEdge systems are the only data-center solutions supported by a combined Sun and HDS staff in the global, mission-critical Sun StorEdge Joint Support Centers. These new products join the family of Sun StorEdge Complete Storage Solutions including the Sun StorEdge 6900, which offers the industry's first integrated storage virtualization capabilities optimized for midrange to data center consolidation in the Solaris Operating Environment. SUN STOREDGE L5500 LIBRARY Rounding out Sun's data center offerings is the Sun StorEdge L5500, a superset of StorageTek's new L5500 tape library. Designed to address open systems customers' demands for large tape libraries that can efficiently and economically support their continually growing businesses, it has the highest capacity and performance in the industry. Providing up to 13.2 Petabytes of storage capacity with a single point of management, the StorEdge L5500 decreases customers TCO by offering the lowest cost per slot. SUN STOREDGE PERFORMANCE SUITE SOFTWARE Sun StorEdge Performance Suite software (Sun StorEdge QFS software) is ideal for massive data consolidation solutions and has been designed from the ground up for high-performance, data-intensive environments. With the unique ability to scale up to 252 Terabytes, this shared file system complements and optimizes the new Sun StorEdge 9970 and 9980 systems by enabling them to achieve maximum throughput performance and seamless file sharing. SUN STOREDGE UTILIZATION SUITE SOFTWARE Sun's StorEdge Utilization Suite software (Sun StorEdge SAM-FS software) enables true file sharing and replication of multiple application hosts in server farms. This suite works hand-in-hand with the new Sun StorEdge 9970 and 9980 and L5500 library to increase capacity usage through intelligent backup and recovery based on the time value of data. Making backup and data accessibility easier than ever, customers can eliminate windows by moving backup copies of data to multiple storage media types and, based on the critical nature and time-value of data, the customer can set policies to have the most important data be the most readily accessible. For more information visit www.sun.com.